The Jewels of Tessa Kent (51 page)

“Hmm.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Not much, I wasn’t there. How did Maggie react?”

“She didn’t. They did. They were rocked by the news. You could literally feel their astonishment hit as they took in the word ‘sisters.’ They were incredulous and shocked and fascinated and salivating at the gossip value, but, to their credit, they held it down pretty well. A couple of them blurted out ‘Sisters?’ and Juliet looked as if she’d just solved some large puzzle, and Maggie didn’t say anything at all, just kept on consulting her everlasting notes, so I blundered right on, doing a Miss Innocence number, and I said that I’d assumed they must all have heard by now, that Liz Sinclair and Hamilton Scott and Lee Maine knew and I simply imagined
that everyone in the publicity department would know … Christ, I really blathered all over the place, fool that I am.”

“How can you be so sure if she didn’t react?”

“Because the entire rest of the meeting, which lasted another endless hour, Maggie
still
didn’t look at me or use my name, and I could tell that she’d become ten times colder than before, and now she was deeply resentful, because I’d pushed too hard and confronted her. And I had! Oh, Sam, I had, damn it to hell! I pushed her into being in charge of the publicity for the auction and then I pushed her again, the very next time I saw her! I didn’t
need
to bring that up, Sam. I should have let it come out if and when Maggie chose for it to come out, or never be mentioned at all, if that’s what she wanted. Instead of walking lightly and carrying no stick at all, I stomped on her toes and bashed her over the head with a baseball bat.”

“Okay, so you’ve had a setback, I won’t try to tell you otherwise, but you haven’t ‘blown it,’ darling.” Sam said after a moment’s thought, “You’ve gotten a modified version of the truth out in the open, so at least you don’t have to go around acting as if you two had never met before, which would be pretty hard to keep up for six months, especially since other people at S and S already knew. And it’s good that everyone will be calling you by your first name and feeling more comfortable with you. You’re not just Tessa Kent anymore, you’re Maggie’s big sister, so that makes you human.”

“Do you really think that or are you just saying it?”

“I really think it. You know I don’t soft-pedal things to you. When you get right down to it, it’s not the sister stuff that’s the big deal. It’s the mother-daughter connection that’s making her act the way she does, and that’s been going on for so long that it won’t go away until … it goes away. Somehow. Or other.”

“Oh, Sam, I was so awful!”

“You were natural, you weren’t on guard, you were too happy to see her, you wanted to shout from the
rooftops. You weren’t very smart. Even you, darling, have moments like that. But, remember, you’ve still got six months. Anything can happen. Six months is a long time.”

“Oh, Sam. Six months? Six months! They’ll go by so quickly! ”

“You can accomplish miracles in six months … we’ve only been together a little more than a year and I can’t even imagine how time passed before I knew you. ”

“I guess … time … is always relative,” Tessa said in a small voice, drifting to the window and looking out blindly. Six months, not even two full seasons of one year. One day Sam would be a fine old man, a famous old man, still teaching, still writing, happily married, the father of a family, one day, twenty or thirty unimaginable years from now. Oh, Sam, when you look back, will you still think six months was a long time? Will you have any idea how much I would have given to grow older, year by year, with you? How often will you remember me, my darling? How long before a day will pass without your thinking of me? How long until you meet another woman? Please, be happy, Sam, but don’t forget me—not too soon …

Y
ou look so tired,” Polly told Maggie, inspecting her friend’s face. “Is it the same reason I’ve been hearing about for the past few endless months so I can keep on feeling guilty, or is it something else?”

“Keep feeling guilty,” Maggie said grimly. “You have no reason to hope for anything better.”

“Tessa Kent is still the trooper of troopers?”

“Honestly, Polly, if you could just see her. Today, in a long list of other appointments, we had an interview lunch with a particularly difficult stringer from the London
Times
who obviously considers movie stars deeply beneath him, particularly those with spare jewelry to hawk—an old-line Labour Party supporter who made it clear that he’d confiscate the Crown Jewels if he could and abolish, if not behead, the entire Royal Family—and by the time she’d finished charming him, the guy’d have agreed to increase the Prince of Wales’s revenues and chipped in his own money to help buy the House of Windsor a new yacht. Talk about manipulative! Thy name is Tessa Kent.”

“Isn’t that her job?”

“Sure it is, I’ll give her that. But she’s such an
operator
.
It’s sickening to see the way she gets people to eat out of her hand.”

“How’d she do it?” Polly asked, always avid for details.

“Damned if I know. She used the familiar wit and the familiar warmth and smiled at his attempts at jokes and pretended she didn’t hear his snide remarks, and finally, God knows how, got him to tell her about his wife and how he had been suckered into buying her an engagement ring from Asprey, who are three times ‘by appointment’ to members of the Royal Family, because that’s what his wife had been dreaming about all her life, and after that it was off to the races about the psychological reasons for women’s inner attachments to jewels until finally she led him down the garden path with historical stuff like Mary Stuart’s famous black pearls that Queen Elizabeth got her hands on even before she ordered Mary’s head chopped off—”

“Aha, the old black pearl ploy.”

“Exactly. Now this Brit has decided to do a two-piece story on the whole subject, concentrating on her collection of a particular kind of rare and valuable Tahitian black pearl—their color is called ‘peacock’ because it ranges from deepest purple to dark green—a large, perfectly matched string could bring close to a million dollars … please, Polly, it’s sickening. This reporter is well on his way to becoming a black pearl expert and there are some seventy different shades of them. She hooked him good, with the help of poor Queen Mary … she played Mary years ago, that’s how she knew about Mary’s pearls. Aviva was sitting there looking as fascinated as he was, but then of course she can do no wrong with her little cheering section.”

“It’s not so little,” Polly murmured.

“Only Juliet, Aviva, Janet, Joanne, and Dune. Every last person in the press department,” Maggie admitted grimly. “Lee can’t get over her either, the way she’s cooperating. I always bring at least one of the others along for an interview and they’re all getting a version
of the treatment I got when I was a kid—the stories she tells the press are simply more adult, more detailed, and cleverly tailored versions of the way we used to play with her jewels when I went to visit her. She had ways of making these stones into more than they really are, and somehow adding their luster to her own. Oh, I’m so confused, Polly! She’s doing a dream job, no one of us could ever come close to working the press the way she does—after all the jewels don’t belong to us, we don’t know anything about them, we’re not the person who’s auctioning them for a good cause—but it still makes me furious! I’m disgusted with myself, but I can’t help it.”

“You’re not, by any chance, just a little jealous of her admirers?”

“Polly, that’s sick! The reason she’s collected this little band of worshipers is that she’s trying to get at
me
, and who knows it better than you, who talked me into it in the first place? And if I don’t bring one of them along, I’ll end up being alone with her in the limo on the way to the restaurant and back.”

“God, I honestly don’t know what made me say that! Sorry! I must have forgotten, for a minute, why all this is happening.”

“I wish I could forget,” Maggie said limply.

“She must be totally determined to ‘get at you,’ as you put it, or she couldn’t possibly be going to all this trouble,” Polly said thoughtfully. “I imagine that Tessa Kent has better things to do with her life than win over some journalist who came into the lunch with a hostile attitude … she can’t be used to having to do that.”

“Of course not. When the studios arranged her press interviews it was always a major coup for whoever got to meet her. ”

“So look,” Polly said hopefully, “don’t jump down my throat, but if she’s putting herself through all these hoops, with months more of the same to come, with every day an exhausting one, which you’ve admitted yourself, to say nothing of the travel still to come to those foreign cities where you’re taking the highlights of
the collection and where she’ll be doing mobbed press conferences—not to mention that she might even be attached to some of these jewels she’s selling—why couldn’t you—”

“
Don’t start with me!
”

“Why couldn’t you be … a little less … 
unbending
, I guess is the word I’m searching for.”

“Polly, you promised!”

“I know, I know, but these complaints of yours have been going on and on for months. You know what my opinion was of Tessa Kent when you told me your story, but now I’m beginning to think no matter how bad a mother she was to you for eighteen years, she’s trying her hardest to get to know you
now
, and that
now
should maybe … be given some, just a little bit of … credence, allowed to have some truth of its own. It’s real enough, God knows. You can’t dismiss it when you live with it all day, when you see the effort she’s making—and all of it to try to get through to you.”

“A few months effort? Eighteen
years
of neglect. Do you think that’s a fair balance, Polly?”

“Of course not. There’s never going
to
be any fair balance. Forget you ever heard the word ‘fair’; leave it out of your vocabulary. Tessa Kent can never make up to you the vital things that she didn’t do while you were growing up. Not ever. But do you have to hold so tightly onto the crime, Maggie? Isn’t there ever going to be any forgiveness? Not the slightest bit, no matter what she does to try to earn it?”

“Hell, I can’t deal with you, Polly. You’re almost as manipulative as she is. I feel totally awful. My energy level is down to my shoes.”

“PMS?”

“God no. I don’t even believe there is such a thing … I’ve never had it anyway, not so I’ve noticed, maybe because I’ve been so irregular all my life. I haven’t even had a period in ages. I had a dry spell like this when I first came here and was working as a temp. It’s stress that’s getting to me. Seriously getting to me. She’s driving
me crazy and so are you, Ms.-life-isn’t-fair-Guildenstern. Did you think up that idea all by yourself? I’m going downstairs to see if Barney’s home yet. He was going to work a little late tonight.”

“How’s my bright-eyed boy?”

“Bliss. Pure bliss.” Maggie brightened and stood up, ready to leave, all thoughts of Tessa driven from her head. “If it weren’t for this auction I’d say that my life is so utterly glorious it’s frightening. I never guessed I could love anyone like this. We were born for each other, and don’t give me that theory of yours that you knew it all along, from the first day you saw us together.”

“But I did,” Polly said serenely. “I should have written it down and mailed it in a sealed letter to myself and waited till now to give it to you—then you’d believe me.”

“But you would have been wrong because if it had happened then it wouldn’t have worked out. Now is the perfect timing, and the rest of our lives will be the perfect time.”

“I know this is a ludicrously old-fashioned idea, but has the thought of getting married crossed your mind?” Polly asked casually as they walked toward her door.

“Oh, we have eons to think about
that,
” Maggie said with fine disregard. “We’re together and we’ll never be apart—but marriage?—all those deadly formalities? Having to see Madison and Tyler again? We’ll simply have to elope, but all in good time. What’s the rush? Living in sin is so much fun—as you ought to know.”

“Jane and I would get married if we could,” Polly said wistfully. “I’d just like to have the legal opportunity. If you decide to go the traditional route, will you let me give the wedding?”

“Oh, you mistreated, generous creature, of course!” Maggie cried, remorsefully, hugging her friend with such enthusiasm that she all but lifted her feet off the floor. “I’d even let you pick out my dress, or else I’d end
up in slinky black velvet or something equally unbridal.”

“Go find Barney. Just thinking about weddings makes me cry,” Polly said, pushing Maggie out the door.

Tessa carefully checked the laden tables that room service had just brought up to her apartment. Almost from the start of the auction planning she’d invited the press department to an early breakfast every Friday morning so they could sit around in comfort, assess the work done in the past week, and get a jump on the next week’s plans.